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Theory — the new unrealized capital gain tax is designed (or will have the effect of) forcing people like Elon Musk to surrender control of corporations resulting in PMC control instead of founder control.
As some detail, there is a proposed 25% tax on unrealized gains for the super wealthy coupled with a 44% tax on realized gains. So let’s say you own 10b of a 100b company. If you do nothing you will owe 2.5b of tax. But if you sell 2.5b, you’d actually owe more! So you end up having to sell a pretty big chunk of your stake. This means that before companies get really large founders have to sell a big chunk of their equity preventing super wealth. It also changes incentive structures for founders making them more likely to cash out.
Once they cash out, PMC will take control. PMC coexists with modern democratic policy. Therefore, the democrat tax proposals help ensure corporations are run by allies.
I don’t see a tax on unrealized gains passing. The entire lobby of every super rich person in the US would have to fail, and that would surely represent an extraordinary failure.
The better approach would be to tighten up estate taxes so that the wealthiest families have a ‘minimum required tax burden’ to pay when a patriarch dies, regardless of what measures they’ve taken to transfer wealth in life. So if Bob dies having unquestionably accumulated $500m in his life,
In any case, this wouldn’t require anyone to relinquish control, because you could borrow against your equity to pay the tax bill.
That you think there's a "better approach" means the proposal is already working. You've already accepted the frame that there's some problem to be solved to get the government more revenue from "rich people" (which may start with hundred-millionaires but will quickly if not immediately hit hundreth-millionaires), and now you're only arguing about the form of the massive tax increase.
This is a good point. When the first income tax launched in 1913, the tax brackets were 1 to 7 percent.
More than 99% of people fell into the 1 percent bracket. The 7 percent bracket was for incomes over $500,000 (approximately a bajillion in today's terms).
Once a new form of taxation is invented, it is almost never reversed, but only expanded. Federal spending as a percent of GDP has increased from 18% to 25% in the last 20 years. State and local spending has increased apace. That is problem.
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